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The Circle of Life With Bagels

FOR Maria Balinska, it was never just bagels and yuks. “People used to laugh at me when I told them I was writing a book about bagels,” she said. “I’d tell them it was actually quite serious.”

Her book, “The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread,” was published this month by Yale University Press, and Ms. Balinska, the editor for world current affairs radio for BBC News in London, was in New York to talk about it over bagels and eggs at the Second Avenue Deli.

The book, thought-provoking and fact-filled, is one that also uses the bagel as a way of viewing Polish-Jewish history. It begins with an unexpected look at a boiled, baked and ring-shaped possible ancestor in southern Italy and a steamed and baked possible predecessor found among the Muslim Uighurs in northwestern China. The book moves on to Poland, the Jewish bagel’s probable birthplace, and the bagel’s older and similar Christian relative, the obwarzanek.

Ms. Balinska, 48, whose svelte angularity makes it clear she doesn’t indulge excessively in her subject matter, came to the study of bagels with appropriate credentials. Her father’s family is Polish — part Jewish, part Catholic. She grew up outside Princeton, N.J., not far from prime bagel territory.

“But we didn’t have bagels at home,” she said. “I had my first bagel in college at Princeton in the early ’80s — a green bagel for St. Patrick’s Day.” As a graduate student in international relations at the University of Maryland, she won a scholarship to study in Krakow, “and I saw this thing, the obwarzanek, that looked like a bagel, and I became intrigued.”

Later in the 1980s, she worked at the Institute of Jewish Affairs, then the research arm of the World Jewish Congress in London. “And I began talking with people about the bagel,” she said. “I started collecting material and slowly started putting things together.”

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CONNOISSEUR Maria Balinska in London, where she says the bagels are smaller and chewier than their American cousins.Credit
Jonathan Worth for The New York Times

One thing she found was that a story popular in the United States, that the bagel was first produced as a tribute to John III Sobieski, king of Poland in the late 17th century, after he saved Austria from Turkish invaders at the Battle of Vienna in 1683, is just that, a story.

The tale originated largely “because Sobieski was very special in his relations with the Jews, even though he had many faults,” she said. “He surrounded himself with Jewish doctors, Jewish administrators.”

Her own theory of the bagel’s origin, she said, is that it is a cousin of the pretzel — it may already have been a staple among Jewish bakers before they migrated to Poland from Germany in the Middle Ages, or it may have developed alongside the obwarzanek, which was a favorite at the Polish royal court, a court that was frequented by the Jewish elite.

The first known reference to the bagel among Jews in Poland, she said, was found in regulations issued in Yiddish in 1610 by the Jewish Council of Krakow. They outlined how much Jewish households were permitted to spend in celebrating the circumcision of a baby boy — “to avoid making gentile neighbors envious,” she said, “and also to make sure poorer Jews weren’t living above their means.” (The origin of the word bagel is ultimately unclear, but many experts agree, she said, that it comes from the Yiddish word beigen, to bend.)

There were many surprises along her road of discovery, she said. While in Poland on business, her husband, Wojtek Szczerba, found an old pretzel tin with the name Beigel on it. It turned out that a family named Beigel had dominated Jewish baking in pre-Nazi Krakow and made bagels as well as many other breads.

Ms. Balinska is less than happy when it comes to the United States and its love affair with bagels in recent decades, made possible largely by machine rolling and the public’s eager acceptance of frozen food. “Lots of things have happened to bagels now that have very little to do with bagels, or certainly what I think they should be,” she said, mentioning ubiquitous phenomena like giant bagels, many-flavored bagels, many-colored bagels and other unbagel-like bagels. “So many are simply bread rolls in the shape of a ring, in the shape of a bagel.”

Mimi Sheraton, a former New York Times restaurant critic and the author of “The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World” (Broadway Books), agrees about the modern bagel. “Their current state is completely deplorable,” she said. “They should not look big and swollen, they’re tasteless, and they stay forever soft.”

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Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

“You used to be able to eat a bagel that would give your facial muscles a workout,” Ms. Sheraton added.

Ms. Balinska also much prefers the old-fashioned way, she said, a way that has returned to fashion — a hand-rolled bagel, like the one she is eating at the Second Avenue Deli, whose bagel supplier, David Teyf, is her friend. Her bagels of habit these days are those she gets in the Jewish bakeries of the London suburb of Golders Green. Ms. Balinska, her husband and their 3-year-old daughter, Lucy Sidu, live in the Kensal Rise section of London, north of Notting Hill.

The London bagel is smaller than most New York bagels, she said, noting that it also “has a slight tanginess that’s really nice, and it’s more chewy.”

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America’s mass bagel consumption is all the more surprising because until the 1960s, bagels were little known outside large Jewish communities in major cities. In 1951, The New York Times, in an article about a bagel bakers’ strike, thought it necessary to provide a pronunciation guide (“baygle”) and define it as a “glazed surfaced roll with the firm white dough.”

The frozen bagels marketed by Lender’s, a family bakery in New Haven, beginning in the 1960s, were crucial in the birth of bagel nation, Ms. Balinska said. (Lender’s also created some of the earliest cinnamon raisin and onion bagels.) But before Lender’s could achieve its success, it needed to make one big change in its product. “Consumers were cutting themselves trying to slice the early frozen bagels,” Ms. Balinska said. “Then Lender’s realized that the bagels should be presliced. That made the difference.”

The spread of the bagel, she said, was also part of a cultural shift in the United States that led to a greater interest in ethnic foods and in Jewish culture. It was also about “convenience, especially when women started to work,” she said.

But there’s something else. Because of its ring shape, she said, the bagel is attractive and tactile; it elicits a certain fondness. “And,” she said, “you don’t feel affection for a slice of rye bread.”